Fort Worth has a rich popular music legacy that stretches back almost a century and combines elements as seemingly disparate – and yet happily complimentary – as jazz, blues, country-western, rock, rhythm and blues and Western Swing. The city was a fertile breeding ground for celebrated artists from Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys to Ornette Coleman to Robert Ealey to Delbert McClinton to Tex Beneke, Kirk Franklin, King Curtis and myriad others.
From the Crystal Spring Dance Pavilion, where Milton Brown & His Musical Brownies played for society swells and Depression-era desperados alike, to Ornette Coleman’s visionary musical incubator, the downtown Caravan of Dreams, to juke joints like the New Bluebird Nite Club to the subterranean rock scene of The Cellar to the hardcore honky-tonks that lined the Jacksboro Highway, and finally to the grandest honky-tonk of them all — Billy Bob’s Texas — the old cowtown on the Trinity River has served as a backdrop to some of the most fabled venues hosting the hottest bands anywhere in Texas.
In that spirit, Jazz by the Boulevard and Historic Camp Bowie Initiatives, Inc. in 2003 initiated the development of a permanent collection of Fort Worth jazz archives at the Fort Worth Public Library. Its mission is to preserve and promote the cultural legacy of great Fort Worth jazz musicians and to pay tribute to their lives and work, which had a significant impact on the world of jazz music.
To that end, the materials are being made available to everyone through the Fort Worth library for individual research and informative group presentations to school, senior centers, jazz clubs and other groups.